Perspectives
Written from the seat,
not the sideline.
Essays, field notes, and operator perspective on strategy, founder bottlenecks, and building with more clarity.
Most of your product is table stakes. The rest is the business.
A founder spent four months shipping features his prospects already expected. The demo was smooth. The feedback was devastating: 'nothing differentiates you.' Points of parity vs points of difference, and the research that tells them apart.
Some users forgive broken things. Others leave.
A founder shipped a rough beta to technical ops leaders and got 15 bug reports in a week. Another shipped the same category of product to regional facility managers and got silence. Your audience's tolerance for half-built is an industry variable, not a B2B/B2C one.
24 April 2026
The runway story your investor update never tells
A founder I worked with sent a great-month update at $11k MRR. The number she did not put in the email was that her runway had dropped from thirteen months to nine. The growth was real. The runway story was the more important one.
21 April 2026
Investor updates as leverage, not reporting
A founder showed me eighteen months of monthly updates from a year before he raised. The change in tone over those eighteen months had pre-sold the round. The update is not a status report. It is a long-form pitch the reader is allowed to forget they are reading.
19 April 2026
More perspectives
23 posts
The OKR trap at pre-seed
A founder showed me fourteen OKRs across six weeks of frantic re-planning. The team was sprinting at four directions and shipping in zero. OKRs are an org-design tool. Pre-seed startups misuse them as a planning tool, and the misuse is what kills the focus they were built to protect.
15 April 2026
Busy is the enemy of progress
A seed founder showed me a sprint board with 147 closed tickets and a revenue line that hadn't moved in four months. Activity and progress feel identical from the inside. The bank doesn't agree.
15 April 2026
Pricing is positioning
I priced something at $79 and lost two customers who decided I was too cheap to be the right fit. Pricing is the first claim about your product the buyer reads, and it sets the frame for every claim that follows.
11 April 2026
The first ten customers are research, not revenue
A founder I worked with had three paying customers, a twelve-dollar average revenue per user, and a plan to spend the next eight weeks on growth. The dollar number was a distraction. The first ten customers are research; the dollar is a side effect of the research being honest.
9 April 2026
Three term-sheet traps the lawyer's redline misses
A founder showed me a 'clean' term sheet from a brand-name fund the day before he signed. The redline was tidy. The lawyer was happy. The trap was the participation right hidden inside a 1x preference, and three other clauses doing the same trick. Here is what the redline cannot catch.
7 April 2026
What big-company shipping taught me about startups
I shipped eight MVPs across three years inside Accenture, in industries from mining to insurance. Most of what people assume about big-company shipping is wrong. The four habits that transferred to my pre-seed work were the ones nobody at the small-startup conferences talks about.
5 April 2026
The week you should have stopped building
Pre-Series-A companies usually have either a distribution problem or a product problem. Rarely both. The one you don't have is the one you keep working on.
25 March 2026
Distraction has a CRM — it's called LinkedIn
Graham was right that competition doesn't kill startups. Distraction does. What he didn't say: distraction in 2026 has an interface, a notification schedule, and a search function. It's called LinkedIn.
5 March 2026
The co-founder state-of-the-union
CB Insights has co-founder disputes as the second-most-cited reason startups die, sitting above cash. Most of those disputes were decidable twelve months earlier. Nobody had a forum.
11 February 2026
Founder burnout as a cash equivalent
Fifty-four percent of founders report being burned out, per the 2025 Sifted survey. Stop treating this as a wellness issue. Treat it as a line item on the balance sheet. That's the only framing that makes the spend decision obvious.
14 January 2026
The fundraise is a trust market, not a sales funnel
Manufactured urgency (the fake term sheet, the invented deadline, the 'closing this week' that's closing nothing) is the fastest way to kill a round. VCs talk to each other. They know when the FOMO is real.
23 December 2025
Count open questions, not open roles
Every hire is a confession of a bet you've already made. Before you pick up the phone to a recruiter, count the questions your business hasn't answered yet. The first number tells you how ready you are.
2 December 2025
Your agency isn't a partner. It's a vendor with a pitch deck.
A founder paid $62k for a rebrand last March. Twelve-page Notion doc. Four typography systems. Three months later she asked me which one to use. Here's the mismatch.
4 November 2025
Two columns: the VC metric and the customer truth
Column one is what your investor posts on Twitter. Column two is what they actually mark you up for. Most seed founders are running the wrong one.
7 October 2025
The wrong first hire kills more startups than the wrong idea
Founders overestimate how much 'complementary' matters and underestimate how much 'redundant' kills. A note on first-hire pattern-matching.
2 September 2025
Write the kill criteria before you launch
Most seed-stage experiments have no exit conditions. Every one becomes a referendum on the company because there was no pre-agreed threshold that would have made it a normal closure. Fix that in advance.
5 August 2025
Loneliness is a decision-quality problem
First Round's founder survey keeps finding that pre-Series-A founders report isolation as their biggest stress. It's not a wellness issue. Without sparring partners, you regress toward whichever investor called you last.
8 July 2025
Grit, stubbornness, and the three questions that tell them apart
Founder culture confuses perseverance with truth-avoidance and fail-fast with flinching. Both can be right; both can be wrong. Here's the diagnostic that separates the two inside the specific decision in front of you.
10 June 2025
Delegate judgement, not work — the founder-to-CEO trap
The thing that got you from zero to eight people quietly stops working around person fifteen. Chesky's Founder Mode is right that you shouldn't detach. It's also half the answer.
14 May 2025
The $100M model nobody wanted to build
Twelve days before a capital allocation meeting, the executive asked me for three slides. The full value-chain model was a month away. The number on the one-pager would have been wrong.
2 April 2025
Eight MVPs in, I stopped calling them MVPs
An MVP that ships and an MVP that's used are two different artefacts. Notes from shipping eight of them inside a Tier-1 consulting program.
11 March 2025
Why I left consulting to find out if any of it works
Advising is safer than building. That's the problem. A year in the founder seat has made me a better advisor. I've been the founder who can't afford another meeting.
6 February 2025
The quarterly schlep inventory
Graham named it: schlep blindness. The work that actually compounds (customer implementations, integrations, regulatory slog) is invisible to the demo-day feedback loop. Here's how to put it on the calendar.
19 November 2024